Red Hat Provides Cloud Access Option

The Red Hat distro extended its subscriptions with the choice of Linux running on the local server or from the Amazon cloud.

With the feature Red Hat Cloud Access, RHEL Premium subscribers now have the choice of running Linux on their own servers or as a cloud service while still maintaining the same support model. All versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as of 5.5 will have the simultaneous local server and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) support to ensure consistency in both environments. The support applies to all RHEL 5.5 provided functionality, including security updates and functional extensions.

Red Hat released its current RHEL 5.5 at the end of March. Red Hat was already a participant along with other companies in Amazon's EC2 service since the end of 2007, although at that time it was still called Software as a Service (SaaS). Red Hat's Fedora community division is also busy with its own cloud computing working group.